This is about power and women being kept out of power positions for 3,000 years.
--Kim
She’s a 69-year-old classics professor who studies ancient Rome. When she became publicly visible, she received rape and death threats. Her response: write a book proving women have been silenced for 3,000 years.
Mary Beard is a Professor of Classics at Cambridge University. She studies ancient Rome—a civilization that collapsed 1,500 years ago. For most of her career, this meant academic papers read by other scholars, lectures for students, and quiet research in libraries.
Then she started appearing on television.
In the 2000s, Mary began presenting BBC documentaries about ancient Rome. She was brilliant, accessible, and funny—making 2,000-year-old history feel deeply relevant and alive.
She also didn't look like what television expected female presenters to look like.
Mary was in her fifties, with long gray hair, a distinctive gap in her teeth, and zero interest in conforming to TV beauty standards. She dressed casually. She didn't wear makeup designed for cameras. She looked like a professor, not a model.
And the internet lost its mind.
The comments were vicious: she was "too ugly" for television. She should "stay in the library." One viewer said she had "a face for radio." Others were far crueler.
When Mary spoke about politics or contemporary issues—things male public intellectuals do constantly without controversy—the backlash escalated. She received rape threats. Death threats. Graphic descriptions of violence strangers wanted to inflict on her simply for having opinions while being a visible woman.
In 2013, after Mary appeared on a BBC program discussing immigration, a man tweeted that he'd like to see her genitals mutilated. He faced prosecution, but the pattern continued: every time Mary spoke publicly, a torrent of misogynistic abuse followed.
Most people would have retreated, deleted their social media, or stopped appearing publicly. Mary did the opposite. She started studying why this happened.
Not psychologically—she's not a therapist analyzing individual trolls. She looked at it historically and structurally, using the exact same analytical tools she'd applied to ancient Rome for decades.
What she discovered is that this pattern of silencing women isn't modern. It's ancient.
In 2014, Mary delivered a lecture for the London Review of Books titled "The Public Voice of Women." In 2017, she expanded it into a short book: Women & Power: A Manifesto.
The book is only 115 pages long. But it traces 3,000 years of evidence showing how women have been systematically excluded from public authority since the very beginning of Western civilization.
Mary starts with Homer's Odyssey—written around 700 BCE, and one of the foundational texts of Western literature. Early in the story, Penelope comes downstairs to ask a bard to stop singing a particular song because it upsets her. Her son Telemachus—who is barely an adult—tells her: "Mother, go back upstairs and tend to your own tasks... Speech will be the business of men."
This is literally one of the first scenes in Western literature: a man telling a woman to shut up and go back to women's work, declaring that public speech belongs solely to men.
Mary traces this pattern forward through three millennia:
Roman women who spoke publicly were described as "barking" or "yapping"—animal sounds, not human speech.
When women in ancient Rome tried to speak in the Forum, they were physically removed, or their speech was described as unnatural, transgressive, and dangerous.
Medieval women who claimed religious authority were often labeled witches or heretics.
Elizabeth I had to rhetorically transform herself into an honorary man ("I have the body of a weak woman but the heart and stomach of a king") to claim authority.
Throughout history, powerful women have been masculinized, demonized, or reduced to their relationships with men rather than recognized for their own power.
The pattern is consistent across civilizations: women are welcome to have private influence, to whisper advice to powerful men, or to work behind the scenes. But public authority—the power to speak, to command, and to make decisions that others must follow—has been coded masculine since the Odyssey.
Mary's argument isn't just that women have been completely excluded from power. It's that power itself has been defined in ways that make female authority seem unnatural, transgressive, and wrong.
Even when women achieve positions of authority, they face constant pressure to adjust: lower their voices (but not too much, or they're "shrill"), assert themselves (but not too much, or they're "bitchy"), and demonstrate competence (but not too much, or they're "threatening").
Male leaders are just leaders. Female leaders are constantly navigating impossible double binds—criticized for being too feminine (weak) or too masculine (unnatural).
This isn't an individual failure. It's structural design. The institutions, the language of authority, the very concept of what a leader looks and sounds like—all of it was built around men for thousands of years.
Mary's own experience proves her thesis. She's one of the world's leading experts on ancient Rome, has published dozens of scholarly books, and is a Professor at Cambridge. Her qualifications are unquestionable.
Yet, when she became publicly visible, the response wasn't an engagement with her ideas. It was an attack on her appearance, her age, and her right to speak at all. Strangers told her she was too ugly for television—a criticism never leveled at male historians with far less impressive credentials.
The threats she received were designed specifically to silence her by invoking sexual violence, reminding her that her body could be violated just for speaking publicly.
Her response wasn't to retreat or to argue that individual trolls were just bad people. Instead, she showed that this silencing mechanism has always existed, that it predates the internet by millennia, and that it's deeply embedded in how Western civilization understands authority.
Women & Power doesn't just document exclusion. It asks: what would power look like if it weren't defined by masculinity? What if authority didn't require masculine voices, masculine styles of leadership, or masculine ways of asserting dominance? What if we rebuilt power structures around collaboration instead of hierarchy? Around inclusion instead of exclusion?
Mary doesn't claim to have all the answers, but she insists we need to ask different questions. Not "How can women fit into existing power structures?" but "Why were those structures built to exclude women in the first place, and how do we build something different?"
Since publishing the book, Mary has continued her work as a public intellectual. She still receives abuse—but she also receives messages from women and girls saying her work helped them understand that the barriers they face aren't personal failures. It's not that they aren't good enough, assertive enough, or leadership material.
It's that the definition of leadership was designed entirely without them.
Mary Beard is 69 years old. She's spent her career studying dead Romans and has become one of the most important voices on living power structures. She proved that if you want to understand modern misogyny, you need to understand ancient misogyny—because the patterns haven't fundamentally changed in 3,000 years.
Women have been told to shut up and go back to "women's work" since the Odyssey. The tools have changed—social media instead of the Forum—but the impulse is identical: keep women out of public authority.
Mary's response: document it all. Show the pattern. Prove it's not new, not individual, and not fixable by women simply "leaning in" or adjusting their behavior. The structure itself has to change. Because as long as power is defined by 3,000 years of masculine norms, women will keep being told they don't belong—no matter how qualified, capable, or brilliant they are.
Mary Beard received rape threats for being a visible female intellectual. She responded by proving that pattern goes back to Homer.
That's not just scholarship. That's using history as a weapon against the present.
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